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Chenbro RM41416B Rack Mount Server Case

A Closer look:

The Chenbro RM41416B comes in a massive brown box with little in the way to recommend it the box itself weighs 24.66 Kg (54.36lbs) which will make shipping quite expensive. Beyond being a massive brown box there is little information on the outside of the box.

Once you get past the spartan packaging you can see the real beauty of this case…. its massive drive bay selection, all of the drives are mounted in fully hot swappable drive caddy’s providing quick hot swapping of all the hard drives the second you need to. Unfortunately the cabling to connect the 16 drives to your mother board is not included but that is a minor inconvenience.

Front of the case that shows all drive bays filled with drives. The bottom 16 drive bays support 3.5 inch drives. The two bays on top support a 5.25inch drive and a 3.5 inch drive such as a diskette drive.

From the rear you can see the optional power supply which is a tri-redundant power supply. Other than the power supply the back of the case is much like that of a standard case.

As you can see from the pictures this case is massive, all that space was put to great use with the 16 drive bays as shown below. Each of these bays are fully removable and hot swappable as we mentioned earlier but what we didn’t tell you was that each drive bay also comes with its own activity lights which are displayed on the front of the case in a numbered grid. All of the drives are held very securely so they will never come out unless you deliberately take them out.

This shows the entire case with the outer panel in place which helps keep airflow steady and contaminants out of the case.

From the top down you can see the inside layout of the case. The blue clips along the mid-line are a series of fans that blow towards the back of the case. On the right side toward the back you can see that optional power supply I mentioned in the previous set of pictures.

Overall putting the case together was much the same as any other traditional case with the exception of the power supply which while the brackets work they are not intuitive and there is little documentation to support how they go together. Your best bet when assembling the power supply bracket is to look at the pictures from the website and to recreate the look utilizing the pieces available. Overall it took only about 10-15 minutes of fiddling around with the brackets to get them in the proper placement to mount the power supply.

One thing that becomes immediately obvious to anyone familiar with server hardware is that the RM41416B utilizes triple redundant power supplies. In other words, unless the power to your building goes down you will not have to worry about power supply failure causing your server to go down. If one unit fails the RM41416B automatically switches to one of the remaining two, and the same for the second with fail over to the third. This is not a cheap feature for a server case and definitely signifies some serious quality.

Front bezel is removable and replaceable with a protective cover that can prevent tampering with the drives. Beyond just making the drives harder to get to it also makes it more difficult to remove the server… not impossible mind you just more difficult, It does this by removing the main handles.

6 Comments... What's your say?

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I don’t quite get it…what was actually reviewed here? Honestly, it feels more like a generic description of the case than anything else. There’s no measurement of temperatures, sound levels, how the system worked loaded out let alone how it handled drives being hot swapped out or not.

All the pictures look like stock photos from Chenbro, not ones taken by the site. What are the specs of the hardware loaded out in pic3? What hardware was tested in the system? Any issues found during install? Seriously…what was TESTED? What was REVIEWED?

You talked about the power supply being optional but only show pictures with it. If you did test it what was its efficiency? power draw? voltage/amps on various rails? You talk about all the cabling being extra for the hotswap bays but show cabling in the system. Well…what was tested then?

I agree, there should have been more testing. Although it may seem like a “PR piece”, as you put it, it was not designed to be this way. As the managing editor, I honestly appreciate comments like this one, as It shows us what you are looking for in the review.

As for the power supply, It is almost impossible to test the efficiency of a power supply without specialized equipment that costs upwards of $100,000. anyone who tells you otherwise is either misinformed or lying. We test power supplies to ensure that they are within ATX standards.

The fact that you thought badly enough about this review to comment on it is a sign that we need to take a better look at how we review certain items.